


edges that scratch

by murphysvictim (feelingisfirst)



Category: The 100 (TV)
Genre: Enemies to Friends to Lovers, F/M, Friends With Benefits, Love/Hate, Porn With Plot, Porn with Feelings, Slow Burn, Smut
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2016-06-29
Updated: 2017-12-20
Packaged: 2018-07-18 23:19:39
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 13,862
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7335082
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/feelingisfirst/pseuds/murphysvictim
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Nevertheless, Raven was always going to be Raven, and she sure as hell wasn’t the martyr her ex-boyfriend was. Try as she might, she wasn’t exactly kind to Murphy. She was short and snarky and aggressive, but that wasn’t too bad because he was, too. They had almost reached a certain level of angry companionship. Raven was good at giving orders, and Murphy, once he was done sassily expressing his pseudo-discontent, was surprisingly good at taking them.</p><p>Or: Raven needs to get off, and Murphy needs a friend.  Neither expected their needs to be fulfilled by the other.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

_So I got edges that scratch_  
_And sometimes I don't got a filter_  
_But I'm so tired of eating_  
_All of my misspoken words_

"Beggin for Thread" - Banks

* * *

 

Raven was fairly sure that they were even now. If anything, their karmic balance might still weigh in her favor. For fuck’s sake, Murphy had shot her. She still drug her leg along behind her, and every day her brace was a constant reminder of what he had done to her. To be fair though - and dammit, Raven was fair - she’d done her share of screwing him over, too. She had happily intended to hand him over for a miserable death at the hands of the Grounders.

Well, okay, maybe not happily. Maybe even then, she’d felt a tinge of guilt, of vague interest. Maybe even when she was asking him to come to the dropship she was thinking of what-could-bes. Then again, probably not.

Either way, she asked him to come. She forced a smile and said, “We need your help, Murphy.”

He looked up at her with eyes that were narrow and slow in their path up her body.

She waited for him to speak, but he didn’t, and Raven considered making him give in first. Murphy, the asshole, was still just staring at her suspiciously, though, and she knew that she needed him. Fuck that - needing Murphy, needing anyone - but she did need him, and she broke first. She leaned in close and watched him flinch. “Meet me at the dropship in two hours,” she whispered. “Don’t be late.”

“Sure, Raven,” Murphy chuckled, rudely interrupting Raven’s attempt to make a quick exit. “I’ll just nicely ask the Grounders to let me through.”

“Monty’ll let you through. It’s for Finn,” Raven said, hoping that her face was blank.

Murphy held her gaze for too long before dropping his eyes. “Yeah. I’ll be there.”

She had already walked away before he could finish his sentence.

Raven never really expected it, but Murphy showed. She honestly hadn’t planned much for that contingency. Murphy’s urge to cover his own ass was so strong that she doubted he ever left his own tent without good cause. Regardless, she didn’t miss the vulnerability in his voice when he told Bellamy he’d been invited as he stood there, framed in the door of the dropship. The whole thing was damned from the start, but she had been least prepared of all for the look in his eyes and crack in his voice when she pulled the gun on him. Raven could have cried when he pressed his chest against the barrel of her gun, and looking back, she is surprised she didn’t.

She didn’t. Instead, she tried to kill Murphy in Finn’s place, and they were all damned anyway.

He shot her of course but – the stupidest defense of all – he hadn’t meant to. He took care of her in the dropship, after. He hobbled to her, bloodied and broken and soul-bared, and he tended to her just as he had when she was sick with the fever he brought back from the Grounders. Those few hours alone with Murphy were just one more moment in a long list that she tried not think about, along with Finn and being shot and the surgery and being tortured and Mount Weather. She had tried to clean her hands of any incidental debt to Murphy when Abby had first appeared, but apparently she hadn’t scrubbed hard enough.

All that aside, enough time had passed, now, that she was something resembling whole again. Finn still haunted her, but he was more of an angel on her shoulder rather than a regretful ghost tracking her steps. He hadn’t left her, really, but his weight was easier to carry every day. They had both done their best by each other until the end, and she was big enough to be comforted that Clarke was there for him when Raven couldn’t be. Finn died repentant and comforted and as tranquilly as he could. He died for peace, something of a martyr, the sort of death he had wanted, even if it wasn’t the one Raven wanted for him.

Even as Finn’s memory struggled to lift her up, however, there was a demon sitting on her other shoulder, whispering in her ear and weighing her down – and that asshole wasn’t even dead yet. It was necessary, then, that she had gone through a tangled routine of mental gymnastics to realize that she and Murphy were even. She had purposefully tried to kill him, and he had accidentally almost killed her. Raven figured it all came out in the wash. The fact remained, though, that he was a _giant fucking dick._ Still, incredibly noble as she was, she had made a conscious effort to try and wipe their slates clean. Finn had always accused her of holding grudges, after all.

Nevertheless, Raven was always going to be Raven, and she sure as hell wasn’t the martyr her ex-boyfriend was. Try as she might, she wasn’t exactly kind to Murphy. She was short and snarky and aggressive, but that wasn’t too bad because he was, too. They had almost reached a certain level of angry companionship. Raven was good at giving orders, and Murphy, once he was done sassily expressing his pseudo-discontent, was surprisingly good at taking them.

She discovered this when Abby came to her to work on hooking up the electricity in a disused corner of Arkadia – which, by the by, was a stupid name that Raven had loudly contested. It was the biggest pain-in-the-ass project that she had ever seen. The wiring system was terrible at best, and Raven hadn’t been able to make heads or tails of it. Whenever she thought she had figured out the system, she’d find a wire that simply shouldn’t be there.

This was how she came to be sitting in a dark corner of the Ark, her good leg curled in, and her bad leg stretched to the side. She had 3 black wires separated between the fingers of her left hand and a group of red in her right, but now she was staring at a purple wire. What in the – purple? What did that mean? That wasn’t a standardized color. She groaned and flopped forward, forehead slapping against the cool metal of the Ark. She was just considering that she might have to go and ask Wick for help, God help her, when Murphy’s voice sent her jerking upright.

“Aren’t you supposed to be good at this shit?”

Raven twisted around to glare at him over her shoulder. “Let’s see you do it, smart-ass.” She turned with a huff back towards the panel, mainly because that position was much more comfortable to maintain but partially because she fully expected him to leave. Sensing his eyes on her, she reorganized the wires in her fingers in an effort to look like she was making progress.

His weight slapped down heavily beside her, and when she looked over at him through narrowed eyes, he was sitting and looking interested with his legs crossed. “Okay,” he said with a smirk. “I will. How can I help?”

Raven further narrowed her eyes. She was truly squinting now. “You want to help?”

Murphy shrugged. “I’m sick of waiting on you to get the electricity up and running. I’ve been told there’ll be hot showers if you can ever get your act together.”

Raven huffed out a laugh. “Do you even take showers?” She asked as she passed him the red wires to free up her right hand. With his steady eyes serving as new motivation to look as though she was in control, she stuck her hand back into the open space and blindly followed the purple wire up behind the panel above her head.

“Yes!” he snapped.

Raven glanced at him and was surprised to see he seemed actually offended. She noticed that his hair didn’t look as greasy now as it had when she first met him. Unperturbed, she went back to her work.

“Anyway,” Murphy grumbled, “can’t a guy just want to help?”

“A guy? Yes. You? No,” Raven responded and then immediately swore. She had come to the extent of her reach but not the end of the wire. An investigation of the wire in the other direction reached a nearly immediate dead-end.

“What?” Murphy asked, and Raven thought she saw genuine concern on his face as he sat with the bundle of red wires held earnestly in his hands.

“I can’t find the top end of this fucking wire. What the fuck is a wire purple for anyway? This isn’t normal. Black I’ve seen. Red I’ve seen. Green, yellow, orange - but purple? I-”

While Raven had been ranting, Murphy had carefully released his red wires, stood up, wedged his hand underneath the panel above the one Raven had opened and leveraged it away from the wall.

Raven gaped. “There’s a latch system for that, you numbskull.”

Murphy shrugged and stuck his hands into the midst of the wires in search of the purple one. “Got a flashlight?” he muttered as he found the wire and followed it up underneath the next panel.

Raven silently passed the flashlight up and watched, her own mouth forming an “o” in unintentional mimicry, as he flicked the flashlight on and then stuck the handle in his mouth. He held the wires back with both hands as he peered up under the panel above. She was absolutely not even slightly aroused.

“Han hob,” he said matter-of-factly.

“Sorry?” Raven asked, closing her mouth with a snap.

Murphy leaned back and pulled the flashlight from his mouth with so wet a pop that Raven was sure it must have been intentional. “It ends.”

“How many wires go into the base?” She asked.

“The purple one and another three black ones.” He was wiping the flashlight off on his shirt now. She was stoically not looking.

“Fuck it,” Raven said with a sigh and yanked hard on the wire from the base at the bottom of the wall. There was a violent zapping noise, a quiet buzz, and then silence. “Try the switch,” she said.

He did. Nothing changed.

“Well, shit.”

It was three hours later that Murphy and Raven emerged from the room, sweaty and singed but triumphant. The lights were flickering and dull but they were on, although the hot showers didn’t follow for almost another three weeks.

Raven hated to say it, but Murphy had been - wow, Raven _really_ hated to say it – incredibly useful. He followed directions immediately, even when Raven had initially sent him off for a chair with wheels for her. She was mostly intending for him to get mad and leave her alone. Instead, he had said, “Sure, give me a minute,” and been back within ten minutes with a rolling chair and a story of bullying it out from under Jackson that he told with an unabashed smirk. Raven laughed just as shamelessly. She had spent the next three hours rolling around the room, passing him tools, ordering him around, and aggressively trying to avoid touching him. Things had gotten too real too fast when he reached for a live wire, and she had jerked him around by the arm to keep him from electrocuting himself, and they had ended up chest to chest and-

The point was that he was useful.

Plus, really, when Raven thought about it, he could be _useful._ Bellamy was with that nice-enough girl from Earth Monitoring whose name she couldn’t remember. It was a coping mechanism for Clarke if anyone asked Raven – which, probably for the best, no one did – but he seemed quite serious about it. Jasper was nuts, and Monty was wrapped up in keeping Jasper from being nuts. Neither were her type anyway. Wick was – clearly – way too interested in himself for anything to ever work out. She had tried Harper, once, in a fit of desperation, but the sweet thing was much too focused on kissing for Raven’s taste. Lincoln and Octavia were too closely bound and tightly wound for Raven to get a chance at either one. Speaking of tightly wound…

 _God damn_ , Murphy was so tightly wound. But, maybe, part of that was what attracted her to him. He seemed like a core of energy bundled inside of a lanky, strong body that had-

There she went again. And so, Raven decided, she either needed to get it under control or act on it.

Nearly two weeks had passed since she’d given herself the ultimatum, and he’d been none the wiser, but she’d been hunting him. Raven was there watching him crack his neck over breakfast and sneaking glances at him when they sat around the fire at night. She considered requesting to take him off manual duty to be her help mate, because he really had shown a bit of talent, but she shut that idea down before it could grow beyond what she could control. It was when she instinctively went to sit with him during lunch that she decided she needed to make up her mind fast or – God forbid – Murphy was going to think that she wanted to be friends.

It still took her another day and a half before she finally made up her mind.

Raven spent almost the whole day flat on her back underneath the rover that Bellamy had been begging her to fix up. To be perfectly honest it was a difficult job. The mechanics of it were totally foreign to her, so she was flying blind, but she had Bellamy under the impression that she could fix it at any time and just couldn’t be bothered to. Naturally, there was no way she was giving that up. It would be a very cold day in hell before Raven would pass up on Bellamy Blake begging her in any of its forms. Abby had come to her the night before, though, and mentioned that they could really use the rover when pulling supplies from the mountain. Since Raven wasn’t currently furious at Abby, she got to work the next morning.

The day had been long, and the rover still wasn’t even close to ready. Raven’s hip was on fire. She headed for the showers through the dark with loose hair, a crick in her neck, and Murphy on her mind. Okay, alright, not in that way; she was thinking about how he had helped her get the showers working. How silly he’d looked when the pipe burst, tiny braids plastered to his head, and how impotent his look of murderous rage was after the girlish scream he had first let out when the ice cold water hit. She definitely hadn’t been thinking about the water running down his cheekbones or neck, or the way his hands had flexed and released at the temperature shock or anything like that.

Whether she had been thinking of him or not, it was a surprise to see him. The shower door was unlocked – who leaves the door unlocked when they’re showering? Murphy, apparently – and she pushed it open to find him standing there drying his hair. He was completely, utterly, exceptionally naked. Raven could not find words strong enough to mentally express just how naked he was. They both stood incredibly still for several long moments, Murphy’s mouth comically agape as Raven shamelessly looked him up and down once. Or twice. No more than two times though, for sure. She stepped over the threshold and closed the door behind her in order to further prolong her looking, but he did not move.

Murphy was skinnier than Raven had thought but more muscled too. There were details of his body she couldn’t normally see under all the infinite layers he always insisted on wearing. The small scars on his face were joined by more healed injuries than she had expected with the rest of his body exposed. There were several ugly ones on his leg, including one particularly large one that she was sure must have come from the wound that he had when he’d helped her in the dropship. The scars on his chest were wide, long, and perfectly shaped, the marks of a careful sort of torture that Raven hadn’t even considered he’d been objected to. She recognized burn marks curling near his stomach from the similar scars covering portions of her hands. He was near hairless, tanned, and - she did a double take - sporting a significantly larger set of balls than she would have guessed. Raven chuckled and stared with a wry smile and a shameless gaze as she considered the inevitability of someone like Murphy having testicles of that size.

“Should I turn so you can laugh at the other side, then?” Murphy said steadily.

Raven’s eyes finally snapped up to meet his. She had to hand it to him; he was standing almost perfectly still and carefully relaxed. His muscles and pose were loose, his voice was measured, and only the set of his jaw and the gripping of the towel in his hand indicated his irritation. “I’m not laughing,” Raven responded with significantly less poise, “but please feel free to pivot.”

“I heard you laughing,” Murphy retorted, voice rising. “Don’t say you weren’t fucking laughing when I can hear you laughing.”

Had she laughed? Raven paused and attempted to reassess, but she was coming up blank. Either way, her mind was suddenly made up, and she knew that they were getting off on the wrong foot for what she had planned. “Only fair you should laugh at me too, then.” Without hesitation, she began to strip. She started with something easy: her boots. The last thing she wanted to do was to give the poor boy a heart attack. Raven leaned back against the shower wall and bent over to start unlacing her shoes. Once she had already bent she realized, in retrospect, that perhaps she should have given Murphy a bit of a show but then realized just as quickly that it wouldn’t have worked due to her bad leg, which was Murphy’s fault. She glared up at Murphy through her ponytail hanging down over her face, suddenly infuriated again, but Raven was inexplicably placated to see him still standing there, staring blankly at her. She made quick work of her first boot and tugged it off before starting on her second. “Normally, this is when I’d be inviting you to strip, too, but you’ve gotten a little ahead of me.”

“Raven,” he said, voice throaty, and she peeked back up at him again, marginally concerned he would pass out from the shock. He was frowning this time, and the towel had finally hit the ground. For all his forced relaxation earlier, his every muscle was taut now. She could see the tendons standing out in his arms and jumping against the skin of his neck. When their eyes met, Murphy raised one hand as though to touch her, and Raven expected him to speak, but instead he dropped his hand and kept his silence. Raven shrugged and resumed her efforts.

“ _Reyes_ ,” he hissed, and Raven groaned as she tugged off her other boot and tossed it to the side.

She straightened and furrowed her brows at him. She didn’t think he noticed, though, because he was actively burning holes into her eyes, now, so she started to tug off her shirt. She waited until the shirt was halfway up over her face, thankful for the momentary reprieve from his gaze, before she spoke. “Look, Murphy, if you don’t want this, fine. Just say so, and I’ll stop. I won’t cry or kick your ass or anything, I swear, but everyone likes naked girls, right? Hell, I dunno about you, but I love naked girls myself.” By now she had tossed both her shirt and undershirt aside and was twisting to reach for her bra strap before she thought better of it and started on her jeans instead. Just in case he came around, she wanted to leave something for him to do.

“You do?” Murphy responded, several beats later, and Raven scrambled for a moment to figure out what he was responding to.

“Hell, yeah,” Raven finally said with a grin, licking her lips. After a bit of shaky effort, she managed the button on her jeans and started to wiggle out of them. “Maybe I’ll let you watch sometime if you can find us a willing third.”

“Us?” Murphy asked, and although he had been distracted by the movement of Raven’s hands and the exposure of her flesh since she’d touched the hem of her shirt, his eyes were back on hers now.

She found herself thinking that his eyes were like blue fire; she generally tried not to wax poetic but decided that she would allow it this once. She could all but physically feel the weight of him on her, although he was still across the room and out of arm’s reach. Raven didn’t realize that his body had relaxed again until it tightened once more. She hesitated, jeans halfway down her thighs. Her eyes flickered down and, sure enough, he was growing, so she figured she hadn’t gone too far astray, but still - she didn’t want to give him the wrong idea. “Poor choice of words,” she amended, and he ground out a quiet chuckle and looked away at that.

She had finally managed to get her jeans down to her knees. Normally, this was the part of her night time routine where she would flop backwards onto her bed and writhe around in a stilted maneuver in order to fully remove her pants, but she didn’t suppose that would do any good in furthering her cause of attracting Murphy to her. Instead, she let go of her waistband and reached up with grease-stained hands to drag the elastic from her hair. She was the one to seek out his eyes this time. “Murphy, if you want to leave, that’s fine. Like I said, no pressure, but either way, I’m going to be getting naked. You’re welcome to help out.”

Murphy held her gaze for a long moment, and then dropped his eyes to rake over her body for even longer. Although Murphy was still completely naked, and Raven was still wearing her bra and (most of) her jeans, she suddenly felt like she was the one who was vulnerable. She had just started to relax under his gaze and was taking the opportunity to enjoy the view when he suddenly crossed the room in a few short strides. He quickly shoved his hand into her hair, catching and tugging the unbrushed tangles. He pulled her head back, forcing Raven’s face up towards him and then froze.

Raven let her mouth drop slightly open, fighting back the urge to tremble in the tension between them, waiting for Murphy to bring his mouth to hers. Surely he would. Surely this time he would break first.

The moment kept stretching however, and Murphy wasn’t moving. He just stood there, with his hand tight in her hair and a carefully guarded few inches between them. His chest was heaving, but his eyes were steady, and she could feel the heat radiating off his body and sinking into her skin through the scant distance separating them.

She raised a hand to flatten against his chest, and he flinched violently. She jerked her hand back at his reaction, and her eyes dropped almost all the way closed as she tried to look down his body. Before she could get very far he tugged on her hair again, and when Raven’s eyes flashed back to Murphy’s face, he was staring steadily at her lips.

“Jesus, Murphy,” Raven finally ground out, “are you gonna kiss me, or are you gonna make me beg first?”

Murphy genuinely smiled, and Raven realized that she had never seen him do that before.

She sincerely hoped she was about to see him do a lot of other things that she’d never seen him do before.

“I mean, if you’re willing to beg, that could be fun,” Murphy said, voice so quiet that Raven wouldn’t have heard if she wasn’t so close.

“If you do it right, I’ll be more than happy to beg, but not for just kisses.” She had barely gotten the words all of the way out before Murphy’s mouth was finally, finally on hers. She was parting her lips for him instantly. He was aggressive, and their teeth with clacking together with every movement he made. Raven raised her hand to rest against the back of his neck and thought better of it at the last moment. Instead, she settled her hand against his shoulder, and although he flinched forward again, he used his momentum to press her body between his and the metal shower wall behind her. She shivered forward back towards his warmth, pushing her hips firmly into his. He growled against her lips and leaned his body back into her. She ground out a quiet moan despite herself when she felt his hard length against her stomach.

“Fuck, Raven,” Murphy hissed into her mouth, and Raven smiled against his lips.

When she brought her other hand up to sink her nails into his hip, he remained steady. She drug her hand down his chest, nails grazing over bumpy scars as she caught his bottom lip between her teeth. “That’s the idea,” she retorted.

He pulled her back from the wall and snuck his hand up her back to fumble at the latch of her bra before finally unclasping it. When it came undone, he dragged his mouth from hers and stepped back to lift the strap over her head and down off her shoulders.

She dropped her hands from his body to let the bra fall to the floor.

“How do you always look so fucking good?” Murphy ground out, both of his hands dancing up her bare stomach to brush along the undersides of her breasts.

Raven smiled at him, lashes lowered. Her heart was racing up against the base of her throat, and she was taken aback by the gentleness of his touch and the awe with which he was looking at her.

He pressed his right hand firmly upward, testing the weight of her breast in his hand, and she arched her back for him, pushing her chest up into his grasp. He smiled again at this, looking up to catch her gaze, before lowering his head to take her right nipple into his mouth while he continued to knead her other breast. His free hand settled loosely on her waist while he lapped and sucked at her chest, and by now Raven found herself arching so hard against the wall she felt the strain of it spreading down into her hips.

She started to relax backwards, but his mouth chased her nipple, the suction loosening and then restarting. She let out little gasps accordingly, and Murphy looked up at her with wonder.

He gave the other breast a few moments attention while she stood panting against the metal then he shifted both his hands down to her ass. Murphy peeled her away from the wall, hands firmly spanning the width of her ass, and he squeezed hard as he finally let go of her nipple with an obscene pop.

She was struggling for air, hair half in her face, as she opened her eyes again. Raven could not believe that it really was Murphy doing this to her. She’d spent the last two weeks furiously touching herself to the thought, and honestly, she had thought of him before then as well. To realize it was actually happening was a bit much for her. By the time she’d tuned back in, his hands were at the hem of her jeans, wiggling them down the thickness of her thighs.

He dropped to his knees to pull them to her anklea. He leaned forward and softly kissed the apex of her thighs, looking up at her with wide eyes as his lips touched warm cotton.

“Fuck, Murphy,” Raven whispered, unable to look away.

“What was your line, again?” Murphy asked as he slipped nimble fingers under the waistband. “Something snarky about that being the idea?”

“Shut up, Murphy,” she groaned as he slid her panties slowly down to her thighs, leaving kisses in the tuft of hair exposed in his wake.

Between the combined efforts of his hands and his mouth he worked her panties down to meet her jeans, and she was contemplating the imminent explosion of her skull when he wordlessly bumped her good leg with his shoulder.

She shook her head. “It’s not gonna-” she started, but he cut her off.

“Give me your hands.”

She held them out immediately, surprising herself with her complacency, and he gave her a look of ultimate sincerity as he braced them against his shoulders.

“I won’t drop you, Raven,” he said quietly. Murphy wrapped his arm just under her ass and bumped her good leg again.

She stiffened her arms and lifted her leg, but quickly found that he was supporting almost all her weight on his arm just under her ass. He shinnied the clothing off her ankle with his free arm, and then shifted on his knees to bump her bad leg.

“Murphy, it’s not-”

Murphy rolled his eyes and bumped her again.

She sighed and leaned over to begin unfastening her brace, but he caught her mouth with his even as he pinned her hips back against the wall with both hands. Raven worked quickly despite the searing heat of his fingers against her bare skin and the distraction of his mouth, and the brace clattered to the ground. She stood upright again, and when he slipped the arm back behind her to support her, she lifted her thigh with both hands with no further prompting. When he tugged her free of the garment and climbed back to his feet, she steadied herself on his shoulders on his way up. When he reached his full height, she was finally completely bare and thinking about how intimidating he managed to make the few inches of height difference between them seem.

They stood there together and naked for half a beat before Raven dragged him towards her by his neck. She realized what she was doing too late, but by then their mouths had met, and he hadn’t jerked away, so she loosened her grip and kissed down his chin to meet her hands. He tipped his head back, his body pressed tightly against hers, while she placed feather light kisses along the dip in his clavicle. His positive reaction spurred her on and - growing progressively more assured that he wasn’t going to kill her - she set to sucking at his neck, nipping and kissing.

Raven had just started to work in earnest on forming a bruise when his hand dropped between her legs, and she shifted awkwardly to widen her stance for him, mouth breaking from his throat just long enough to adjust. He traced his fingers up and down her thigh, and she quickly found herself moving her hips in accordance, trying to force his fingers to where she wanted them.

 _“I_ don’t tease,” she hissed as she shoved her hand between their bodies and wrapped it around his dick.

He jolted in her hands, and she practically crowed with pleasure as she closed her hand around his dick and quickly set an aggressive pace.

Despite herself, she glanced down between them - _fuck_. It was, she was quickly discovering, always the skinny guys. He wasn’t much longer than average, if at all, but Raven found herself marveling at the way her fingertips just barely met around the underside of his dick. She was suddenly pulled from her musings by his nimble fingers finally - finally - finding her slit, and she tipped her head back at the sudden sensation, her hand stuttering in its rhythm.

“What’s wrong, Raven?” Murphy growled, leaning over her body with his mouth pressed to her ear. “Did I distract you from punishing me?”

“I wasn’t punishing you, you-” she started, but the breath was knocked from her lungs by the sudden pressure of two of his fingers plunging up to the knuckle inside of her. “You dick!” She ground out as soon as she regained her breath. Raven knew, though, that her body was betraying her words; already, her hips were canting in time with the harsh thrust of his fingers. Instinctively, her hand slowed on his cock, struggling to adjust to the throbbing in her cunt, and Murphy immediately slowed his hands in response. “You dick,” she repeated, quickly getting the point. She smiled at his whine when she pulled back her hand, and he straightened from where his forehead had been pressed to the wall over her shoulder to frown at her. She waited until she had his attention and then obscenely licked her palm from top to bottom before dropping her hand back to his cock and restarting her movements with a twist and a much more gentle pace.

“Mmmmm,” Murphy purred into her ear, and his own movements slowed. His thumb came up to find the pulsing nub above the moistness his hand was buried in. “You’re learning.”

“You’re the worst,” she hissed, but she kept her pace despite herself.

“You wouldn’t have picked me,” Murphy explained as he gently began to scissor in a third finger and firmly steadied her with his other hand on her hip as she arched, “unless you liked my mouth.”

“Something like that,” Raven agreed, voice thin as her body simultaneously fought to escape and to get closer to him. The twisting rhythm of her hand did not waver. “So put it to good use.”

“I have to have you coming back for something, don’t I?” Murphy insisted, and suddenly, all three of his fingers were buried firmly inside her as his thumb ground down as well. He kissed her jaw and leaned back to watch her.

She could barely keep track of where he was through the fluttering of her lids, but every time she caught sight of him he was watching her intensely, lips parted.

He moved his steadying hand down from her hip for just a moment, and she keened at the loss, but he merely brushed her hand from where it was still half-heartedly tugging at his dick before moving it back to hold her again. “Just focus on this,” he said quietly, low enough that she had to strain to hear it.

So she let her eyes flutter closed and focused, and Raven was half-wondering why she was taking his orders so obediently when his fingers curled against the spot inside of her, and she jolted back into the moment. One of her hands went to rest over his hand on her hip, and while she placed the other flat against his chest, he loosely intertwined his fingers with hers.

“Just focus, Raven,” he said, and she hadn’t really been aware of him moving, but his voice was back at her ear, and now that she thought about it, she could feel his damp hair brushing her cheek. “Focus on how I’m making you feel. Is it good?”

She was panting now, and managed to only whine his name in response.

He chuckled, and she whined back wordlessly. “I’ll take that as a yes, then. I’m glad, Raven. I want to make you feel good.” The rapid circles of his thumb tightened. “I want to make you come on my fingers, and then I’m going to make you come on my dick.”

“Jesus,” she ground out, and his laugh was a hot rush on the shell of her ear. He was so warm against her, and she couldn’t think at all. She was so close.

He dropped his head to mouth at her neck and ground his thumb down against her clit, and she came silently, head thrown back and eyes squeezed tightly shut.

When Raven came back down, Murphy was still going just as hard as he had been and she had to slap his hand away from her shuddering thighs. “Fuck, Murphy, just-” and words failed her, so she reached back for his dick and pulled him towards her with an arm looped around his shoulders.

He grinned and bent to hook his arms just under her ass.

She took the hint and wrapped her other arm around his neck as well. He lifted, pinning her against the wall with his weight as he freed his left arm and kept his right arm supporting the dead weight of her leg as well as the bulk of her body. Fumbling with his off hand, he guided himself towards her. He looked at her as though he was about to say something, but she cut that off at the pass by quickly kissing him. He took the hint and pushed slowly into her. They shuddered together, pausing at the point where he was just inside her, before he pushed the rest of the way in.

“Good?” Murphy asked quietly, and Raven blinked her eyes open to find him watching her intently, their lips still barely brushing.

“Good,” she agreed, softened by the earnestness of his stare, and a heartbeat passed with him buried all the way inside of her before he started to move.

His eyes flickered closed, his body relaxed, and now Raven was the one watching him, watching the way his brows knit together and the way the muscles of his chest loosened and tightened with each slow, tactile thrust.

She was lost for a moment in the look and feel of him, floating in the steady, aching rhythm, before his free hand wandered up to her clit and began to rub. “Shit,” she muttered, and when she opened her eyes he was looking at her and smiling again. Seeing Murphy smile was still a little unsettling. His thrusting was still focused and measured, but his hand was sloppy, gently rubbing in wide strokes, and the pressure was not enough. She hated to give him power by asking for anything, but this was worth it. “Harder,” she breathed.

The quirk of his eyebrow was almost worth it in the millisecond before his hips snapped forward.

She gasped and threw her head back, banging it against the wall, and he took the opportunity by dropping his mouth and latching onto the peak of her breast.

“Your wish,” he muttered, haphazardly kissing his way down the chasm between her breasts, “is my command."

She rolled her eyes and was irritated that he wasn’t looking at her to see it. One of her arms was still wrapped around his shoulders, but the other was knotted tightly in his hair, pulling her towards him as she rocked against him.

“Raven,” he ground out, hips still snapping as his fingers dug into the flesh of her ass. “You feel so,” he said and then paused, refocusing the tight circles of his fingers on her clit, “so fucking good.” He pushed down hard and snapped his hips up, and she came undone around him, quietly groaning this time in contrast to her silent orgasm before. He didn’t last long after she came, his hips snapping roughly a few more times as he dropped his free hand down to knead the span of her ass. His whole body tensed as Raven watched through hooded eyes, but she looked away when his eyes flickered up to meet hers. His gaze burned into her reddening cheeks, but once his body relaxed, he was nestling his forehead into her clavicle. His eyes safely averted, she relaxed as well and dropped her arms to rub against his back.

The silence extended while they panted, but eventually he gently lowered her to the ground and peeled himself away from her.

“Great,” he muttered, “now I need another shower.”

Raven laughed a little too loudly. “Nope. My turn. Get out.”

He smirked at her, and she found herself staring at the flush that was sneaking down his scarred chest as he quickly slipped into his jeans. Her eyes were drawn to the movement of his hands as he pulled up the zipper and did the button, but when he reached for his shoes, she quickly bent to do back up her brace.

She could feel his eyes on her, watching her, but by the time she stood with her brace tightened back on her leg, he was gone.


	2. Chapter 2

_I know my disposition gets confusing_  
_My disproportionate reactions fuse with my eager state_  
_That’s why you wanna come out and play with me, yeah_  
_Why? Why? Why?_  
“Beggin for Thread” - Banks

So she was satisfied now, right? She had been suffering an itch, and Murphy had been convenient, and now she would be perfectly content being solitary and angry and celibate for the foreseeable future, right? Right?

It worked for longer than she expected it to. Raven loudly shouted down the more realistic part of her mind every time it timidly raised the possibility that maybe, just maybe, she’d get desperate enough to go back to him sooner rather than later, but deep down she knew what she should really expect of herself. She wasn’t ashamed of her perfectly human and natural urge to have sex, and she wasn’t afraid of pregnancy thanks to her Ark-mandated implant. She was, however, at least a little bit irritated that she had stooped low enough to have sex with Murphy. Never again, she thought. Maybe she’d give Harper another try, or innocently suggest herself as a third for Lincoln and Octavia, surely that would be a good time - and so in such a way, Raven was able to aggressively combat her sex drive into submission alongside the barely-there tingles of shame that felt almost like the phantom sensations in her leg.

Time passed, and she spent a lot of it avoiding him. Not that it was hard; she found herself wondering after the first week if he was avoiding her and thought about it just long enough to be offended before she stopped the whole thing in its tracks. First and foremost, no way was Murphy ashamed of her, and therefore he was not avoiding her. The only man who’d ever set foot on Earth that was stupid enough to be ashamed of her had died, and Murphy was smarter than that. Besides, Raven knew she was a damn catch. Hell, she would date her. So, he wasn’t ashamed, despite the way he had run out of the showers, and he wasn’t avoiding her, and anyway it didn’t matter because Raven was definitely not thinking about Murphy.

Besides, the boy clearly had plenty of solitary tendencies, and it wasn’t that far of a reach to suspect why he wasn’t happily sitting around the table with Raven and the others shooting the shit over dinner. She didn’t see him at all, in fact, until nine days after she’d run into him in the showers, but who was counting? Regardless, Raven was pretty sure he hadn’t seen her, and she certainly didn’t seek to be noticed by him. It explained a few things though; he’d been in the cafeteria long after most everyone had already eaten lunch and was helping himself to a bowl of stew with his head down and eyes averted. Raven had just been there to try and find Bellamy for clarification on why, exactly, he found it important that she specifically rewire his room if not solely for the purpose of torturing her. She feinted to the side as though she was in one of those old spy movies she’d watched during her long nights up in space, and she was disgusted with herself. She wasn’t hiding; okay, she was definitely hiding. Why did she find herself lurking around a corner straining to hear the slopping of soup just so she wouldn’t have to make eye contact?

But the moment passed and so did the days, and she found herself wondering if maybe, possibly, he really was avoiding her. Had he always gone to such lengths to stay out of the public eye? Was he always so late for dinner, so early for breakfast? He didn’t seem like an early riser - holy hell, why was she psychoanalyzing him?

Well, it was simple, she finally decided while staring into the fire one evening with a cup of Monty’s moonshine clasped between her hands. He certainly had never gotten anything out of making himself a part of the group, that much was obvious, and even if he wanted to now, it was probably too late. The 100 would never accept him, Raven decided with an assurance that felt like finality. There was no sense in him sticking his neck out - she didn’t fail to wince at the accidental edge to that thought - and it was simply that her own anxiety made her more inclined to notice him than before. The situation was settled.

For a few more days, at least. Less than a week later, the fate that was prophesied by Raven’s early taste of Monty’s moonshine came to pass, albeit with something of a twist. That evening, a party had been planned. Raven didn’t know who had thought it up or why, but Bellamy had passed her the news, and she wasn’t inclined to miss the opportunity. By the time she got to the out-of-the-way grove of trees which Bellamy had described to her earlier that day, the bonfire was already blazing. Raven suspected that any pretense of privacy that had been proffered by the obscure location and the dark of night was lost thanks to the rising flames, but things were something near peaceful now. She could relax.

And she was relaxing, several drinking games deep, by the time she noticed Murphy. She was surprised he came, but she was more surprised that she had somehow missed his entrance. Honestly, the thought that she should have noticed his arrival irritated her, but here she was thinking it. Nevertheless he had arrived; he stood just past the ring of light which the fire cast, near the closest edge of the tree line. He stood, of course alone, his standard issue metal cup held by a loose grip around the rim. She watched him long enough to see him look over his shoulder in a comically obvious caricature of regret and intent to leave, but he stood there nonetheless.

“Flip cup!” The voice was in her ear, insistent, obnoxious, and dripping with the scent of alcohol.

“Ew,” Raven responded, pushing Bellamy’s chin off her shoulder as she pivoted to frown at him.

“You don’t like it?” He whined, as obviously drunk as Raven had ever seen him. “Didn’t you just beat me at it?”

Raven laughed. “Of course I did. That’s not what I - nevermind. Hold on, I’ll play, but you go ahead. I’m gonna grab us another teammate so no one has to sit out this time.” And she had turned away from him and started across the field towards Murphy before she’d even realized what she’d said. Well, she thought grimly, at least he seemed like the sort of man who could hold his liquor.

He watched her approach from a fair distance; he made no move to meet her halfway until she made it abundantly clear that she was gunning for him with a jerk of her hand. He came towards her cautiously; there was an element of trapped panic in his expression, but it was largely guarded by one of forced calm. “You rang?” He asked petulantly as soon as they were within earshot.

“Come on,” she said even as she turned away from him to head towards the table where Bellamy, too drunk to notice the unusual event, was waving her on. “You’re on my team,” which, okay, was definitely not a sentence she’d ever supposed she would say to John Murphy before. She mostly didn’t expect him to follow her anyway. She’d done her part, she figured, but then again what was she repenting for? Anyway, she’d asked, she’d tried, it was over. There moment of maybe-connection in the shower could be severed now. She could stop looking for him everywhere she went. She could stop thinking about him in the privacy of her room late at night. She could maybe ask Octavia about that threesome after all.

But there was the weight of his presence beside her, right next to the weight of his presence that she carried with her all the time in her left leg. He was silent, and she was so thankful. They crossed the space together, and Murphy closed the distance between them as well, drawing nearer her side with every few steps. Raven only noticed because she was watching him from the edges of her vision.

Bellamy accepted Murphy’s position on his team with no more than a topping up of Murphy’s cup. Raven took her place at the front of the line and Murphy moved to her right in a smooth movement that brought back to the forefront of Raven’s mind the peace with which they had worked together.

“Bottoms up,” Raven said pointedly, when their opponents, Harper, Monty, and Monroe only stared blankly at Murphy. She didn’t check to see how he was holding up under the force of their gaze and instead sighed with fake complacency. “You should see him drink,” she said pointedly and hoped that he would live up to her explanation of the agressive way that she had pushed him into her social scene. Why was she doing this? Too late now.

“Bottoms up,” she said again, and brought her cup to her mouth to compel Monroe, the starter of her opponent’s team, to join her. Raven hesitated just long enough to allow Monroe to pick up her cup before she started chugging, eyes clenched shut against the harsh burn of the moonshine slipping down her throat. She finished first and slammed her cup upside down onto the table, hanging just over the edge, and crouched into position to begin trying to flip it right side up on the table. It took her almost a half dozen tries but she got it, and Murphy had started to drink before the cup had stopped tottering.

Now that she was no longer focused, Raven was aware of both Bellamy’s raucous cheers and Murphy’s steady stare that had flickered out as he drank. He set his own cup down even more quickly than Raven anticipated and slapped his cup down on the table. He hesitated, for a moment, adjusting the amount it hung over the edge, but then managed to right it on the first try.

They didn’t win the game, in the end. Bellamy flipped his cup with such intensity that he’d sent it flying onto the ground, and he’d had to go drunkenly scrambling after it. It didn’t matter, though, because something had shifted in the dynamic. Monroe had made a half-impressed comment about Murphy being a good drinker after all. He had made a dark quip in return about alcoholism running in his family, but Monty had laughed, and the group relaxed. Something had been righted; something small, nothing that would fix their staring eyes while he suffocated, his quiet murders, but it was a start.

Maybe that was why he gravitated towards her, she realized. Maybe because she was the only one who had been on the ground with them but hadn’t stood and watched him hang, hadn’t watched them tighten the noose around his neck.

It didn’t matter. She had her claws in, holding tight to just this side of drunk, and she thought maybe Murphy did, too, judging by the ease with which he moved. Of course, he always moved like sex on legs; a prowl and a fluidity that brought to mind other motions, but there was a calm that night that announced a confidence she had never seen him possess. She thought about the way he had held her body up and the staccato, smooth movement of his hips against hers.

Shit.

Anyway, she wasn’t going to do it. This was a step she wasn’t going to take. She had promised herself - maybe? She had definitely thought about promising herself that she wouldn’t proposition him again. Maybe she’d just thought about propositioning him again? It was all blurring together. So she sat on a boulder near the dwindling bonfire and she made herself stay. Octavia was straddling Lincoln on a log a ways away which was, apparently, okay, because Bellamy was laying flat on his back next to Monty, pointing at the stars and drunkenly slurring the myths behind constellations. Jasper, Monroe, and Harper all sat around the table still drinking and playing a game that had rules that Raven couldn’t fathom beyond the possibility that they simply were making them up as they went along. Most of the others stood clustered close to the fire in the creeping cold of the night, talking in the sort of too loud voices that only drunks ever use. She wasn’t looking at Murphy. She wasn’t watching him. Raven certainly wasn’t thinking about him.

Their thing, whatever it was, had come and gone. She would do nothing more to instigate it.

So she was a little surprised when he did.

Raven wanted to attribute it to the moonshine, but regardless of the reason, she did not notice him until his sleeve brushed hers as he settled down onto the rock beside her. She could smell the alcohol on his breath as he turned to look at her, and she waited nervously for him to speak, silently watching the fire.

“What?” She finally asked when he continued to just stare, eyes dark and chin raised.

“I’m drunk,” he told her.

She laughed before she could choke it down. “Okay.”

“Well,” he quickly amended, interrupting her. “Not quite drunk. Almost.”

Raven turned to look at him seriously, head cocked slightly to the side. She was more sure of where this was going than she was of how she would react. “Me too,” she said.

“I’m drunk enough,” he continued, almost as though he hadn’t heard her at all. He extended his hand, and it was steady. She turned away from him and back towards the fire, but he did not waver. She sighed, as though it was a burden, and she was doing him a favor, but she put her hand in his.

Raven expected him to immediately tug her away with it, but he didn’t. Instead, he adjusted their grip so that he could press the back of her hand to his chest. She turned to look at him, surprised, and he was simply sitting there, his hand tight around hers, with her hand pressed near his heartbeat. Suddenly fearful someone would see, she looked around; no one was looking in their direction. She relaxed, but he saw her concern and quickly disentangled his hand from hers. She thought about saying something, maybe apologizing, but instead she closed her mouth and turned back to the fire.

The silence hung between them; Raven let it. She felt the tipsiness both heavy and weightless in her chest, and she wondered if he felt the same way. She could also feel his presence beside her; he felt warm beside her, despite all the layers he wore and the residual heat of the bonfire on the other side of her face. Somehow, the silence seemed comfortable; she remembered the brief moments of pleasant silence while they worked together weeks before.

“I’m drunk enough,” he said again, and Raven turned to look at him with a face that showed only curiosity for his next move. “Come with me?” He asked.

It wasn’t an order, Raven realized, but a question, and maybe that was all it took to tip her over the edge. But regardless she stood, ready to follow him, ready to give in - but only, she told herself, only because he had asked.

Murphy remained frozen in place, his casual arms crossed and leaned back pose suddenly stiff with uncertainty.

Raven realized that he thought he had offended her, and she was leaving. Raven stuck her hands into her back pockets for fear that he would hold out his hand and that she would take it again, and she shrugged. “Lead the way,” she said.

Murphy physically jerked back; he was visibly startled and ducked his head to avoid eye contact. He shook his head as though shaking off his fears, and he stood, unsteady, from the rock. If Raven didn’t know better, she would have guessed that he was suddenly embarrassed by the prospect of sleeping with her, shy of his proposition to her. Nevertheless, he strode off into the darkness of the woods. Raven paused, suddenly unsure. She glanced towards the fire and the insularity of the group behind her. She was not part of them either, but she was not an outcast like he was. Nobody glared when she passed them by, nobody hated her. At the same time, however, she was on the outside looking in, the same as Murphy. She was not there when they landed. She was older. And many of the delinquents did stare when they saw her, except with pity instead of hatred. They remembered Finn, and her injury, and her torture at the hands of Mt. Weather in a hip that wasn’t quite dead. At least Murphy never shied away from what he had done to her. Murphy faced her head on, with the same kind of bared-teeth aggression that he faced everyone in his life. She was in his life. When she turned to look at him, Raven could barely make out his silhouette in the dark amongst the trees. If he had checked over his shoulder to see if she was following, she hadn’t seen it. Raven pulled her hood up over her head and, limping, followed him into the dark.

She caught up with him quickly, she realized, only because he slowed for her. He led her back to the Ark in silence, several steps ahead. She trailed him with her heart racing. She opened her mouth more than once to tell him that she had changed her mind, that she was going to bed. She thought about just heading away from him, going the long way back. Yet Raven kept following him. His steps, though considerably shorter than his normal stride, did not stutter. He walked with his head bowed and his shoulders slumped forward.

By the time they reached the wreckage of the Ark, Raven was wondering if she was in a dream. The night was quiet, save for the noisy chirping of the cicadas. She could smell the smoke from the bonfire clinging to the fibers of her hair and her jacket. She found their steps had fallen into time, and she realized that since he was several paces ahead and not looking back, that must have been her doing. She wondered if trying to offset their steps would prove that she cared about him less or more.

They climbed through the broken part of the fence, and Murphy waited and held a part the wire for her so that she could more easily climb through. She was thankful that he didn’t hold out his hand for her again; she could manage it on her own. He was still standing there, however, when she straightened.

“Do you want to go to my…?” He trailed off, still not making eye contact.

Raven nodded. She thought that maybe if she spoke, she would end the whole thing, and she wasn’t sure at all if that was what she actually wanted.

Murphy returned a brisk nod and then turned away from her again. Raven felt compelled to reach out and touch him but barely held back; instead, she kept pace with him as he lead her to his tent. They went around to the back of the Ark where the city of tents stood clustered together; from afar, Raven tried to guess which was Murphy’s. She predicted it was the one set off by itself near the fence, so she wasn’t surprised when they went off the worn down path of grass to head to the tent that Raven had picked out.

Murphy unzipped the front flaps and, awkwardly, held back one of the flaps and gestured her in first. She shook her head but ducked into his tent. It was desolately empty; his little bed was covered with furs but only a single pillow. She could see the shadows of other items tucked under his bed, but that was all there was in the tent. Save for the bed against the far tent wall, it was empty.

“Spic and span?” She said, for lack of something more biting to say.

“Something like that,” Murphy responded with his back to her as he zipped back up the tent. The metal purr of the zipper suddenly made Raven feel trapped. She was in Murphy’s tent, now, and the familiar heat of the alcohol in her throat wasn’t enough to choke down the realization that she would have to struggle with that zipper to run out of the tent, should the need arise.

Murphy turned to face her. She couldn’t catch his eyes because his head was so decisively lowered, but Raven told herself she didn’t care. She didn’t need eye contact to fuck him. As business like as the first time, she sat down on his bed and leaned over to take off her shoes.

“I’m seducing you, dammit,” Murphy growled, and she looked up to laugh at him just as he was pushing her back against the bed. The laugh was knocked from her lungs, and she let him tip her back and crawl on top of her; she did her part by wiggling her hips to straighten herself along the length of the bed.

“Seduce away,” she breathed along his cheek because his whole body was stretched out along the length of hers. His hands were on either side of her head, and his knees were straddling her hips.

He pulled back to look at her and she met him with steady eyes. Raven suddenly wasn’t sure if they’d ever made eye contact. His eyes were light and clear and focused, and she thought that they looked warm, although it was too dark for her to make out their color. She blinked.

He leaned back down and began to kiss at her neck. This was relatively familiar territory; they had done this once before. This was safe enough, and it felt good, and it wasn’t heady eye contact and speculation about the meaning of them. He made his way to her jaw, his face burrowed under her ear. She could feel his hair tickling her face and occasional brushes of his eyelashes and the weight of his hands pressing into her hair and she realized that, dammit, she’d already been seduced. She might as well enjoy it.

Raven tipped her head back and arched her chest up into his; Murphy curled immediately around her. One of his arms slipped down into the gap between her back and the bed, bracing her waist up and keeping her chest pressed to his as he licked along the line of her jaw and down to nibble at the tender flesh under her chin. Raven raised one hand to thread through his hair and she tugged it hard. She was immediately pleased with his response as he groaned into her neck and cratered to the force of her grip. She let her other hand touch, feather light, on the bicep of the arm that was firmly gripping her waist and thought about the way his body had screamed sex earlier, when he was just looking into the fire or gulping down liquor or holding out a firm hand to her. What, Raven wondered, was Murphy’s body screaming now?

As though on cue, he pulled back from her to settle onto his heels. Murphy pulled his shirt up and over his head and flung it to the side. Raven’s eyes immediately focused on his chest; she had found herself thinking about his scars in the interim since their last interlude. They were worse than she remembered, and she reached out, hand fluttering, to brush along a few of them. Murphy, she reminded herself firmly, was a raging asshole, but the evidence of his extensive suffering was rough and raised under her fingertips. Murphy let her look, eyes averted towards the door of his tent as she silently mapped out the thicker, longer scars with her face carefully schooled into blank studiousness. She recognized the vulnerability of the moment but then wondered if, instead of vulnerability, this was the similar type of forced confidence that had allowed him to stand there, naked and still in the showers. Raven suddenly thought that maybe she was torturing him, cornering him into letting her look at and touch his old wounds. She wasn’t sure if she wanted it to be torturing him; maybe it was something to think about for the next time. Fuck - would there be a next time? Would she want a next time?

Either way, she pulled her hands from his chest and began to wiggle out of her shirt. Murphy’s head snapped around to watch her. He shifted from knee to knee, settling lower onto her as she squirmed beneath him, and then reached down to help her pull the shirt up over her head. He tossed it to the side to land somewhere near his and caught her eyes as he lowered his head down towards her skin once more. She could feel her heartbeat in her throat and thought about pressing her lips to his head but held back for fear of the implication of that tenderness.

His lips, for their part, had made their patient way down towards her clavicle and were working their way back and forth from one shoulder to the other with special attention paid to the dips in the bones and the pulse of her blood. Raven began to wriggle beneath him again when he pulled one cup of her bra from her chest to press kisses underneath its hem. He lifted her other breast from where it rested heavily against her chest and began to suck at her nipple. She had settled one arm gently against his head and the other against the blade of Murphy’s shoulder. He began to work her other breast from its cup as he scratched his teeth along the peak of her nipple. Raven forced herself to still, nervous that she was giving in too easily to his attentions. He shifted his mouth again and began to rub his palm up and down the curves of her opposite breast, waist, and hip.

“I believe-” Raven started to say, finally uncomfortable with their intimate silence.

“I’m getting there,” Murphy interrupted, voice thick from where he was pressing kisses between the bones of her ribs.

“I was promised-” Raven continued, a smile flickering across her face.

“I’m nothing if not a man of my word,” Murphy responded, licking down the center of her chest.

“Then you’re nothing,” Raven snapped, more out of instinct than anything.

Murphy pulled back and met her eyes.

For a moment, Raven thought she had ruined it. She’d taken this little flicker, this fledgling whatever it was and crushed it in her calloused fist. Her chest was full of either a sigh of relief or disappointment. His eyes looked so sad to her, so blue and big.

He shrugged. “That’s fair, I guess,” he said, and then he started work on the button of her pants. She relaxed under the ministration of his hands, the soft brushing of his hands against the skin above her waistband. Murphy undid the button and tugged the zipper of her jeans down. He settled his hands on her hips to begin to pull down her jeans, but then hesitated. “I don’t know,” he said, head dropped and eyes focused as his hands skirted over her brace.

“It’s fine, I’ll-” Raven started, quickly sitting up and waving his hands away.

Murphy moved further down the bed out of her way as she began to hurriedly unlatch the locks. As her fingers stumbled over the clasps, she realized she was embarrassed, and she almost stuttered to a halt. She was embarrassed of her brace that he had forced her into, ashamed of the accommodations she had developed to function after he had crippled her, broken her a part and- Raven took in a stuttering breath. She looked up at him, and he was watching her with a face that was as open and honest as she had ever seen it. He was watching her, she saw then, to learn how to unlock her brace. She took another deep breath, felt the bare weight of her breasts against the insides of her arms, and threw her brace across Murphy’s tent. She would dirty it for him, tear up his space like she had torn up her life.

“Thank you,” he said, and she fell back onto his hard little bed with the distinct sensation that she had done him a favor. She wanted to fuck him, she realized, not the other way around, but she had other obligations to fulfill first.

He was not hesitant in tugging off her jeans, and he dropped them on the dirt next to his cot with her panties entangled in them. There was, somehow, both a sense of careful reverence and rushed business in the way he touched her; Murphy was focused on the task at hand, but he seemed to expect his job to be ripped away from him at any time. He dropped down to rest on his forearms between her legs, and she shifted her good leg open for him, all the while choking down the anxious rustling in her stomach of vulnerability. He met her eyes, slid one hand up the inside of her thigh, and lowered his mouth to the center of her thighs.

Raven felt his breath first, hot and wet against the dampness of her skin and then soon after, the weight of his mouth. He pressed his open-mouthed lips to her, and Raven thought that it was maybe, somehow, romantic. There was something tender in the way that he was holding her hip, the gentle way he was kissing her center. Raven didn’t want tender. She awkwardly, halfway rolled her hips up into his mouth; he leaned further in, taking the weight of her good leg shifting up his shoulder and hefting up the other leg after it. She could feel the brush of his hair against the insides of her thighs; it was coarse and tickled her, and she was reaching down to touch it again, but that wasn’t the way to keep from making this feel romantic. She wanted this to hurt or, maybe not hurt, Raven tried to adjust her hips and her ideas as her thoughts stuttered in time with his tongue along her opening. She just didn’t want it to be pleasant. She didn’t want it to be as shockingly easy and comfortable as it was. She didn’t want to feel the ache in her heart to match the ache in her groin, in the tightness of her fingers in his hair. She hoped that the tugging on his hair hurt him. Raven wanted to punish him, which, she guessed, was a reoccurring thought process. She wasn’t going to study this, not this specific moment, not the way that he was already pushing her shockingly close to her orgasm.

He had abandoned his playful teasing of her vaginal opening and refocused his efforts on her clit, or, she realized with frustration, the area around it. He was really teasing her now; not playfully, but with obvious intent to make her suffer, as evidenced by the pointed flickering of his eyes searching out hers. So Raven let him have his fun, let him make her pant and twist for just a moment longer than she wanted. That was the kindness she offered him, she told herself, before she slid her other hand into his hair and ground his face down into her pussy. He struggled reflexively for a moment but Raven did not relent, opting instead to smirk and meet his eyes. He quickly relaxed under her hands, and settled his face more comfortably between her thighs, his mouth and nose nuzzled between her lips. He shifted his chin slightly upward and suckled her clit; Raven instantly moaned and relaxed, but Murphy hardly pulled back from her body, only making room to press one finger into hole. He hooked his finger to press against the front wall of her vagina and seek out her g-spot even as he sucked her clit hard into his mouth. Raven could feel her orgasm quickly approaching but she couldn’t let it be that easy for him, so she fought it down. Murphy continued to work for it, humming now against her body, patiently sucking and thrusting, and Raven held off as long as she could, but suddenly she was blindsided by the wave of sensation washing over her. She arched up off the bed, squeezing tightly with her thigh and her fists, chin thrown back and mouth opened in a quiet, drawn-out, “ah.” Long moments passed and then so did the orgasm and she settled back onto the bed. Murphy moved to prop himself up on his elbows, grinning and chin glistening as he shifted to wipe his mouth.

“Another,” Raven demanded immediately, before she had even come all the way down from the first. “Again,” she added, more for herself than him, she realized, because he was already leaning back down to her pussy. He was soon attacking her almost as ravenously as before and was immediately pressing two of his fingers this time into her opening. Raven loved it, the feeling of almost too much, not quite enough, and she felt her second orgasm approaching closely on the heels of the first. She wanted him to work for it though, wanted him to struggle to press her through the second one, so she forced the sensation down and the orgasm back, delaying her release. Her body, however, was tired of this game and was edging ever closer to orgasm with or without Raven’s coherent approval. Murphy had resumed his quiet little noises, something resembling broken humming that she could feel vibrating through her thighs and her pelvis. This orgasm crept up on her slowly; she felt it coming and then linger, slowly climbing upward and upward. She was still and silent, this time, body thrumming against him. Murphy pulled back, finally, to watch. She could only see him out of her peripheral vision, because she was busy breathing through the heights of her orgasm. Finally, eventually, her body and breathing relaxed back down to normal, and she felt herself settle down into her cot as though it had been wrapped in a sort of zero-gravity weightlessness that had her sinking down through the floor of her tent and into the earth and out of Murphy’s arms. Raven blinked, blearily, and brought his face sliding back into focus. He was sitting back on his heels, palms braced on his thighs between her legs, watching her. The distance between their skin seemed cool and pointed after such intense intimacy, but Raven couldn’t tell if he had done it intentionally or not. She wanted to touch him.

“Lay down,” she said, and began shifting to accommodate his body on the bed before she had even opened her mouth. He obeyed without hesitation, settling onto his back on the cot and nudging her to the side to make room for his shoulders. Raven bodily lifted her knee and, with a deep breath and a swinging motion, tossed it across his hips and landed, awkwardly but upright, over his body, braced with her hands on his chest. He let out a breath, pressed down by her weight on his ribcage. She reached between her legs and his to unbutton his pants, holding herself up steadied with his hands tight on her hips, as she tugged and shoved his clothes out of the way. Before she could even really get the jeans past his ass and despite the way his hips were rocking up into hers in half an attempt to make it easier on her but mostly seeking friction, she was able to free his dick. It strained towards her, purple and large with blood and need. She was struck again by the disproportion of it; he was so slight, so stringy and tough and fragile that his penis simply looked as though it didn’t belong. Nevertheless, she was sure the hungry look in his eyes matched hers, and she licked her lips as she guided him inside of her. It took a moment of straining to fit the thickness of his head inside her, but her body stretched to accommodate him, and he pushed all the way up into her all in a rush. God, it felt like too much; it felt like it was taking her breath away, the way that he was just brushing her cervix and stretching her open. Her eyes fluttered, and she focused down on Murphy underneath her. The first thing she noticed was their skin together. The roughness of his pants was chafing the inside of her thighs, but she kept them tightly wrapped around him, and the absurd paleness of him made her look even darker, made everywhere they touched seem like a joining as sexy as the one between their legs. Raven was distracted only a moment by his scars this time, and she settled her gaze on his face. The hunger that he had started this encounter with hadn’t faded. He still looked, Raven thought, as though he might eat her alive, as though he wanted to consume every last part of her. But, Raven remembered, she was in control. She pressed him into the bed and started a slow, steady rock. She was grinding her clitoris down into his pubic bones, thoroughly more concerned with her pleasure than any satisfaction of his. There was a particular feeling of power Raven relished that she seemed to only feel when she was on top of a man. The way she was able to move above him, regardless of who he was, almost unhampered by the dragging weight at her side, the way she could press her palms down into his chest and weigh her down with the whole of her body, the way she could control the pace and her movements and with it his pleasure; it was intoxicating. She knew he wasn’t getting the satisfaction he was seeking from this, but she was; the slow, deep rocking allowed her to take his entire length and brush it against her g-spot while pressing firmly against where she needed it most.

Murphy was below her, panting up at her. She realized he wasn’t fighting her. There was no sexy battle of power like she’d experienced with Bellamy, no over the top show of control that Wick’s machismo had brought about, none of Finn’s frantic caresses. Instead, Murphy simply accepted what Raven gave him; he laid back, underneath her body and her control, and he allowed her to ride him, to please herself or him as she saw fit. Something about this touched her, and she was swept with what she considered to be an otherworldly degree of generosity. She leaned forward, dropping her head into the crook of his neck and licked up his neck as she lifted her hips. This, she suddenly realized, was decidedly different; she didn’t have the control to ride him in the way she had been accustomed to doing, but Murphy gathered the hint immediately. His hands, which had been loosely resting on her hips, shifted up to tightly grip her waist and he helped lift her up only to completely slam her back down onto his dick. She lost her breath. The pace he set was, as most things seemed to be with him, punishing. Raven was left to simply take it, to help lift herself up and gasp her way through the down thrusts. She felt the goose flesh on his skin rise from the noises she was making into his ear. He was groaning back, quiet little half words that she mostly couldn’t catch, but he kept saying her name and it sounded so… She couldn’t find the word. She was twisting into him on every down thrust, sinking her nails into his chest, enjoying his approaching orgasm more than she had ever enjoyed anyone else’s orgasm. And then, without warning, he came; he held her down onto him, his arms wrapped all the way around her hips and thrusting up into her body, with one long, low, wordless groan.

Only a moment after he was done, she was shifting away from the intimacy, frantically twisting her limbs free from his and flopping forward onto the cot. He scrambled to avoid her weight, but then curled around her arm; Murphy’s whole body was pressed against the length of hers, and the closeness felt wrong, but she didn’t have the energy to escape it. They laid together, panting and quiet and spent, exhausted from the physical effort and, Raven thought, the effort of fighting one another even moreso. The moment stretched. Raven breathed. She felt the rising and falling of her chest, the gentle motion of where his chest was pressed against her arm. She felt his eyes on her face, felt the soft touch of his hair on her shoulder. He was warm, and she could feel now the cool air creeping through the tattered walls of his tent and against her bare back. The moment, as indefinable as it was, passed nevertheless.

Raven sat up and began to dress. She fished her clothes up from off the floor and kept her back to him as she climbed back into them. He didn’t move, at least as far as she could tell from her peripheral vision and the stillness of her cot. Not that she was watching. She strapped on her brace, bent forward and breathless against the pressure of her own dead knee. She felt his hand on her back, tracing up her broken spine, and she flinched away. She stood and turned to look at him; he looked so pale and naked and vulnerable. She smiled, despite herself; whether it was out of fondness or maliciousness she wasn’t sure. This time, Raven was the one that left.


End file.
